Wilson ( Gypsies ) perceptively imagines a biological monstrosity: John Shaw, an ordinary human with a souped-up intellect courtesy of hush-hush CIA experiments with intrauterine hormone injections. As John's hypertrophic cortical tissue succumbs to its faulty genetic structure and begins to die, his personality yields to an alter ego named Benjamin. His condition touches Susan and Amelie, two strangers who share John's sense of orphaned isolation and profound betrayal. The women upend their lives to form a fragile family and see John through to the outcome of his unwilling transformation. Wilson's skills afford credibility and even pathos to his fashionings of John and Benjamin, and of the women who love these sentient, doomed fragments of a being both alien and human. A taut ending fittingly closes this indelible portrait. (Jan . )